With advance of computer technology, computer aided engineering (CAE) have been used for helping engineers/scientists to design products in various industries. One of the first developed CAE technologies is finite element analysis (FEA), which is a computerized method widely used in industry to model and solve engineering problems relating to complex systems such as three-dimensional non-linear structural design and analysis. FEA derives its name from the manner in which the geometry of the object under consideration is specified.
The FEA software is provided with a model of the geometric description and the associated material properties at each point within the model (sometimes referred to as a FEA mesh model). In this model, the geometry of the system under analysis is represented by solids, shells and beams of various sizes, which are referred to as finite elements. The vertices of the finite elements are referred to as nodes. The model is comprised of a finite number of finite elements, which are assigned a material name to associate with material properties. The model thus represents the physical space occupied by the object under analysis along with its immediate surroundings. The FEA software then refers to a table in which the properties (e.g., stress-strain constitutive equation, Young's modulus, Poisson's ratio, thermo-conductivity) of each material type are tabulated. Additionally, the conditions at the boundary of the object (i.e., loadings, physical constraints, etc.) are specified. In this fashion a model of the object and its environment is created.
Another technique is referred to as discrete element method (DEM) or distinct element method, which is generally used for numerically simulating the motion of a large number of particles. Today DEM is becoming widely accepted as an effective method of addressing engineering problems in granular and discontinuous materials.
Modern manufacturing process is generally automated with many machines in a factory. For example, one machine may be designed for drawing food products out of a hopper/container and feeding onto a conveyor for further processing. In order to properly design such example machine, many factors need to be considered, for example, type of food products, amount and speed of food products being released to the conveyor, and characteristics of the conveyor (e.g., angle, type, speed, etc.). Many prior art approaches are generally inefficient, for example, requiring a Priori knowledge, ad hoc design, etc. Therefore, it would be desirable to have improved systems and methods of numerically simulating various arbitrarily-shaped objects being released onto a receiving surface in a manufacturing process.